Wally Piper

Ironic that the move that put AIRTRAN on the business travel map, business class, will be gone now. I'm a very frequent business traveler (70-100 segments/year) and was, for a long time a very loyal elite ff at Airtran. No business traveler I know flies WN willingly. Sometimes their schedule/route combination makes it almost mandatory but their pricing for business travel isn't really any better than the main line carriers. I rarely book travel more than a week in advance. Business just doesn't work that way. I've gone back to DL now (platinum medallion) where I can pick my seat in advance, get business class seats and service, and fly with other experienced travelers to instead of the students and once a year families that seem to fill WN's preboard corrals. It was a sad day for KATL based travelers when the buyout was announced.

What is wrong with you people? These are US citizens being brought home for treatment. Ebola is not an airborne virus. It spreads rapidly in Africa because of the general lack of hygiene and crowded conditions in the overtaxed healthcare facilities. You can rest assured that there are already samples of Ebola in research labs in the US.
These two people have families here. Would you be so righteous if it was your spouse or child being brought home?

Not defending LAX which is a pretty bad airport badly in need of renovations , but I've taken many bus rides at many big international airports around the world. BEJ, BKK and HKG come to mind. All big new airports with stunning terminals.

At the very beginning, Happy gets the news that he is going to have to wait 28 minutes before he can taxi to the gate. Now he had to tell the paying pax about it. It was unprofessional to jump down the controller's throat. It is VERY reasonable to expect a DL pilot to know his way around the taxiways at KATL and give him pretty abbreviated instructions. Although the controller remained pretty calm, what he should have done was just give more directions to get the errant driver back on the correct path. Since he could not enter the ramp he was probably being directed to some remote parking area to wait which would have meant that the routine was broken and he might not know how he was expected to get there.

If it was your wife or daughter waiting for the life saving ride you might be a little less tolerant of the interference. If the operator was told that the helicopter was on the way he shouldn't even have to be told what to do. He should just do it. How can the level of risk presented by the UAV even be a point of discussion? We're talking about saving a life vs 10 seconds of pointless video on the evening news. Just having the right to do something doesn't make it right to do it

I hear all the "teething problems" excuses but this is really shoddy design, shoddy manufacturing procedures, and/or shoddy QC. I deal with lots of equipment that carries virtually no life safety risks at all. It is pretty common practice to make things like wiring connections idiotproof. Sensor 1 has a four prong connector, sensor 2 has a 6 prong connector (even though they are only two wire sensors). That sort of thing. I realize that there are probably 10s of thousands of wiring terminations on a 787 and only so many ways to key them. But beyond that, wouldn't you expect that there is a routine function check for something like this as part of quality control? Again, much lower risk equipment I deal with gets checked thoroughly - input 101 turns on, output 201 must turn on and activate device 301. The rule is if it's possible to connect it wrong, then you check to verify that it is connected right. Period. And that's for machines that just make plastic doodads. Factory engineering te

"her employment contract"
I assume, based on all the sympathy for the poor contractor in this case, that she was forced to sign that contract at gunpoint or something. Surely if she knew the terms of the contract she would never have signed it willingly. Terrible thing to do to a person, forcing them to sign such a horrible contract.

At ATL, they added a taxiway that goes around the end of 26L at a lower elevation than the runway. Landing aircraft taxi around that loop without waiting for departing aircraft which often pass directly over them. But it's accessed from the taxiway in between the two runways. I don't know if that is part of the plan at LAX or even possible there. It makes for a long arrival taxi when using 8L instead of 26R but when 8R is busy, it probably still saves lots of time for arrivals.